I am at the Brisbane International Airport (Australia), waiting for the boarding call. I am also using the last few dollars on a pre-paid Wi-Fi card from Telstra, the largest Australian mobile operator.

As I posted before, the service itself is not bad - except that they block FTP and do not support lots of simultaneous connections - tried to load more than 200 RSS feeds into SharpReader through a Telstra Hotspot connection and half came with "Can not find server".

What is really bad is their customer service. I bought a pre-paid PhoneAway card because on pre-pay they charge per minute, and on credit card you have to buy a block and if you disconnect before the end of the time, too bad, it is gone.

Now, I started using a pre-paid card on Tuesday and after 30 minutes put the tablet PC to sleep - the AP did not recognise the disconnection and used all my time! Ok, I had to use the Internet anyway, so I bought more time with a credit card - 30 minutes worth. Too my surprise the AP cut my connection after 8 minutes!

Of course I sent an e-mail to Telstra complaining about this, after all it's something like 45 minutes of Wi-Fi that they took away, at $0.20/minute! And as expected did not get a reply. Somewhere I read that 40% of customers inquiries over the Internet go unanswered. I guess in Australia this is the norm too.

Ok, better post this, the plane is boarding, and I only have another $8 in this account now. Hope Telstra offers a better service next time I come back to Australia.